IBM makes major move into grid computing. (Top technology showcase).

In the first step of what many hope will be a march toward widespread adoption, IBM has announced several new products that seek to spread the commercial applications for so-called Grid Computing.

At the end of January, Big Blue announced ten new Grid offerings targeting key industries, including aerospace, automotive, financial markets, government, and the life sciences. IBM also announced that it has established master relationship agreements with two Grid middleware vendors, Platform Computing and DataSynapse, both of which will play key roles in helping IBM deploy Grids in the enterprise, the company said. (Both companies have been involved in developing commercial Grid products since the early 1990s.) IBM also has agreements with middleware providers Avaki, Entropia and United Devices.

Grid Computing has been used for some time in research and financial settings as a way to harness the processing power of dozens--and sometimes hundreds or thousands--of computers. Often, dozens of clusters are linked, and processing jobs too time consuming or complex for a few systems are batched to multiple clusters, and the results combined when the task is complete.

In the Internet age, the Web has been used as the network that links the systems together. One of the earliest examples of a Grid is the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Project (SETI), a private research effort funded by NASA, the National Science Foundation, private industry, and various research organizations and charitable foundations. SETI links thousands of computers via the Internet, with each one processing data sent from deep space during moments when its CPU sits idle. Other Grids include NASA's Information Power Grid and the ASCI Distributed Resource Management project.

Big Blue officials indicated that the company's Grid offerings will focus on five areas: research and development, engineering and design, business analytics, enterprise optimization, and government development. For example, in financial markets, IBM is offering two Grid options: an Analytics Acceleration Grid and an IT Optimization Grid. The former can help enhance a company's competitiveness and agility in the financial trading market by accelerating its trading analytics operations and increasing its computational throughput. The latter is designed to help customers exploit available, underutilized computing and storage resources, the company said.

IBM's effort is the first commercial implementation of Grid Computing by a major industry player, and is seen as a validation both for the Grid concept and for Linux and Globus, an open-source project that has been developing software for Grids. IBM announced that its Grid offerings are designed to operate in a heterogeneous environment and will incorporate the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA), as well as the Globus Toolkit 3.0, the first OGSA-compliant Grid middleware. IBM Global Services will support all elements of a Grid implementation, with both IBM and non-IBM hardware and software.

www.ibm.com

www.globus.org

www.platform.com

www.datasynapse.com

www.avaki.com

www.entropia.com

www.ud.com

www.linux.com